Ownership and Usership from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century of manuscripts written in Old and Middle English

为了建立包含中世纪英语的所有现存手稿的语料库，我查阅了所有可用的手稿目录，并为每一份手稿填写了一张我为这个项目专门设计的表格。因此，我们收集了每一份手稿的各种形式的简明信息：拥有它的机构、书架标记、日期、书写材料(换句话说，纸张或羊皮纸)、格式、手稿中的文字(以及手稿所用的语言(S))、中世纪和现代早期的所有者和使用者、参考文献等等，我还对著名收藏家和英国大图书馆的历史进行了研究，互联网在帮助我从世界各地收集必要的信息方面非常有用。从研究中得出以下结论：包含古英语的手稿在寺院解散后散落，大部分丢失；然而，它们中的一些被发现并保存下来进行研究，以证明教会和国家的政策是正确的，它们最终被收藏家捐赠给伟大的图书馆，因为那些地方是保存有价值的手稿最安全的地方，另一方面，美丽的中世纪英语手稿是地位的象征，在富有的绅士和商人中被视为家庭财产的一部分，因此它们在私人收藏品中代代相传。包含中世纪英语宗教文本的平庸手稿最初不仅供女性阅读，也供在修道院听不懂拉丁语或在家中用于教育的男性阅读。其中一些似乎是天主教徒在受到压迫时秘密保存和阅读的。

In order to establish the corpus of all extant manuscripts Containing Middle English I consulted all manuscript catalogues available to me and for each manuscript I filled in a form which I had specially designed for this project. Concise information about each manuscript has therefore been collected on each form : the institution which owns It, the shelf-mark, the date, the material on which it is written (in other words, paper or parchment), the format, the script, the number of hands, texts in the manuscript (and the language(s) in which they are written), its owners and users in the middle ages and during the early modern period, references and so on, I also conducted research on famous collectors and on the histories of great libraries in Britain, The internet was extremely useful in helping me to gather necessary information from all over the world.From the research the following conclusion was drawn Manuscripts containing Old English were scatfered and most were lost after the dissolution of the monasteries ; however, some of them were discovered and kept to be studied to justify the policies of the Church and the State, They were eventually donated to great libraries by collectors by the end of the eighteenth century because those were the safest places for valuable manuscripts to be preserved, On the other hand, beautiful Middle English manuscripts were a status-symbol and were treated as part of the family-property among the wealthy gentry and merchants ; therefore they were passed from generation to generation in private collections. Mediocre-looking manuscripts containing Middle English religious texts were originally read by not only women but also men who could not understand Latin in monasteries or were used for education at home. Some of them seem to have been secretly preserved and read by Catholics while they were oppressed.